


A Murder in the Sky

by Lemon_Seedy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Birds, Black Dahlia - Freeform, Character Death, Crows, Dead Body, Death, Murder, Sacrifice, Self-Sacrifice, Trauma, farmers do not like crows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 23:03:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20732177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lemon_Seedy/pseuds/Lemon_Seedy
Summary: A crow reflects on the horrifying events of the murder of the Black Dahlia during a roadside funeral.-And/or, the day I found out that crows hold funerals for each other, and how I passed my literature SAC.





	A Murder in the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> This was apart of something my literature class did as a big project. Our task: to create a short story that would fit into Ceridwen Dovey's short story collection, Only the Animals. And then write an essay on what we'd done, but that part's less important.  
It's a pretty depressing book, all of the little stories feature an animal (obviously) and include some big historic event or person of some kind, but then kill the animal by the end of the story in some really gruesome details. Really glad we did it though, its still a really good read, even if I cried from the very first story.

I had never felt close to him, personally. I did not know how he, in turn, felt towards me, though I would say I’d be surprised if it were any different to my own views. We pursued very separate positions in the skies, I preferred my (arguably superior) place on the outer edges, and he, the middle closest to the front. 

Even so, I had never in my life known such gut curdling fear nor knee-buckling sadness as when I watched his body, nothing more than a dark smudge against the clouds, fall to the ground in a heap of ruffled feathers. His chilling call of danger seemed to linger in the air moments after, as if his spirit, much like the rest of us, hadn’t truly heard the shot fired, all those years ago.

And all those years ago, while we milled about in alarm, despair and some semblance of relief, our most leader-ish members that went by the names of Fitz and Ally took control immediately. Fitz’s loud squawk was panicked but commanding, he told us to leave space, which we were all already doing. I felt sorry for him, truly, for Fitz was quite close to him from what I noticed, especially when one considered the rumours that surrounded them both. 

I wasn’t sure of Ally’s intentions, though. She had been on Fitz’s tail feathers for a few years at that point, ever since she’d joined our flock. She preened her feathers a ridiculous amount every morning, so much that I could see her wings thinning at the top if I were to get close enough, and from what I could tell, she despised the one who now laid at our feet on the tarmac. Fitz rarely acknowledged her or her efforts.

Even so, they managed to get us under control, we reformed our scattered group and roped in those who had travelled a short distance away either to avoid others seeing them grieve, or to convince themselves they did not need to. 

I watched, stood frozen in the spot I had landed an hour prior, as the others slowly crowded to mourn, some stoic enough to do so broke away to stand watch over us. We stayed silent as Fitz and Ally ushered over those closest to him. As they debated in hushed tones what to say and how to say it, I turned away to look around at our surroundings.

Perhaps I could make their jobs easier by finding a place for him to rest indefinitely. I saw a towering mountain, maybe the base of it wouldn’t be riddled with wolves and coyotes this time of year. The forest beyond it? Ah, no, it was known for harbouring hibernating bears, the cubs would surely pick at his remains when they woke next season. A field of grass to the left of us, definitely not, that way was where the shot had come from, looking at the angle of the bullet wound and the direction he’d fallen.

My eyes pulled themselves towards him once again. Peaking through the crowd of my friends and my family, I could see his cold gaze, locked onto the skies, or the ground, or me, or his cousins, friends, Fitz and Ally. I could only stare, though I knew it to be rude, disrespectful. A chill ran down my spine, my feet felt numb and my wings wobbled but still felt stiff. 

He reminded me of something I’d come across when we’d visited Los Angeles the previous year. Something, I say,  _ something _ , how crass of me. The  _ someone _ I’d come across, rather, the someone whom I’d never learned the name of. As I looked into his blank eyes on the road between the others, my mind, out of control, flashed and took me back to that corner street. The shine of white in his eyes, that horrible, bone white picked clean by flies, turned into that woman’s bloodless skin. His blood-soaked obsidian feathers, though one would not assume it was blood, morphed into her hair.

Her face, obscured by that man’s back as he posed her arms above her head, would forever haunt my dreams, both waking and not. When he moved, oh, when he moved. I stood as frozen as a rock. I originally thought her to be a mannequin. How naive, in my own presence I should have known. She was split, cleanly, through her middle, her ice blue eyes were open, and legs spread carefully apart, chunks of flesh cut from her body, and by the stars, she was just metres from the pathway. 

The back of my neck felt like it had been plucked, every gust of wind threatened to blow me over the edge of the apartment windowsill. The haze on me refused to discern if I was with my flock or not, and refused to lift even when the man began to walk hastily away towards a dark car and my instinct was to follow. Instinct? I’d struggle to call it that, but something pushed me from that sill, something told me to trail that car. 

It all sounded so simple-minded now, though. Following that car hadn’t led anywhere, all it had brought me was more questions and an inconvenient and lonely flight back to my flock. I had then supposed that it wouldn’t matter. How wrong I’d been, that woman’s face was plastered everywhere we went afterwards, large versions on buildings, tiny ones on papers, and the ones that I still saw now, when it got too dark at night and I hadn’t fallen asleep in time.

“Shiba, Shiba for heaven’s  _ sake _ pay attention,” the voice of Sieve harshly whispers at me. Ah, we’ve started. They gesture ahead of me, pushing me forward slightly as the first speakers begin their addresses.

The speeches die out by the time they reach me. Perhaps it is disrespectful to be as detached as I, but perhaps the tasteless air or reaching exhaustion isn’t entirely of my own culpability either. After all, grass isn’t meant to move in such a manner as it does now, next to our tarmac burial, the wind moves as one entity, not as a single thin force. The shouting, now,  _ that _ could be mine own fault.

How quickly the melancholy space is disrupted, a whirlwind of blackened feathers and a flurry of erupting fear and terror fill the skies in an instant. The man approaching us is furious, his vengeance it seems, won’t go unfulfilled this day. 

The screams above me have my wings itching to spread, feet hot and legs coiled to spring away. I’d already decided my fate once I’d seen the grass move though. His boots approach me, his walk is lopsided, I’ve now noticed. Walking straight to where I need him to be, good, he’s as stupid as a moth running to an open flame.

His incoherent mumbling his long forgotten as his gun is pointed to my head and I take my last liberty to gaze up at my scrambling peers.

“Maybe I do always get distracted,” I say into the barrel, it almost echoes along with the distant cries of my colleagues, “but so long as time is bought, I care not.” 

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone's interested, some of the other stories from the rest of my class featured a dove unknowingly beneath the Hiroshima bomb, a raven stuck in the middle of the London fires, Ned Kelly's faithful horse on the day of his capture, and a magpie caught amongst the Australian gold rush.


End file.
